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“Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

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Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#41
post #14

That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.

Despite being a joke, I know it's the "Ha Ha Only Serious" [0] sort. I can't help but think this is severely biased by the trends of "enterprise software," where you eventually "give up", and clock your 9–5 writing if+for making a fine living, but erroneously pass that off as a mature, Jedi-like way of thinking about programming, like the meme suggests. (And, consequently, you spend no less time debugging hairy, nested, imperative conditionals with for-loops that are off-by-1.)

I have no beef with if+for, but a large part of the reason they're "goto tools", if you will, is because industry is slow to assimilate many state-of-the-art ideas, sometimes by as much as 40 years.

Simpler building blocks does not necessarily mean simpler solution. If only!

[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha_ha_only_serious

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#42
post #23

This is funny, but it's like saying "Math is basically pluses and minuses". I see coding as playing with hardware without having to use soldering iron.

A marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other, after all. What’s the big deal? I mean a two year old can do that, and they can’t even handle logic yet.

As a marathon runner, people sometimes ask "How does a person run for 3 hours O.O" and well it's about the same as running for 5 minutes except you don't stop.

Simple != easy

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#48

This is funny, but it's like saying "Math is basically pluses and minuses". I see coding as playing with hardware without having to use soldering iron.

Math is just addition and subtraction.

Coding is just copy and pasting boilerplate code and googling how to make it work.

Re: “Coding is basically just ifs and for loops.”

#49
post #14

That first reply is so funny to me because it hits too close to home https://twitter.com/nice_byte/status/1466940940229046273 The more I do this, the more I gravitate towards the simple things.

Except it never can be that simple because many systems have millions of ifs when the entire system is considered. So architecture and parallel evolution of those millions of ifs becomes an entire field of study :)
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